Liberal, Heal Thyself

[unrepentant progress]

Don't go by my excerpt alone. Robin Marie Averbeck makes a complex and nuanced argument defending New Left histories and historians.

Liberalism itself, it became apparent, was a part of the problem: Sincere liberals, no longer restrained by the South, still produced timid and ineffective anti-poverty policy. And in the enclaves that were supposedly liberalism’s refuge, the more ambitious initiatives of the Great Society, such as the Community Action Programs, were not welcomed but rejected by urban—and yes, liberal—political elites. Indeed, by 1965 many mayors across the country had already organized to express to the Johnson Administration how deeply displeased they were with the practice and implications of Community Action—and many of the voters those mayors represented began sending letters to their Democratic congressmen, threatening to start voting Republican if a federal open-housing bill was passed. The passage of that legislation—and other initiatives the Democratic Party made toward racial equity—drove the migration of many former Democratic voters into the Republican Party.

To be clear, the Great Society fell short not for lack of trying. Liberal think tanks, social-welfare workers, and policy experts inside the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations all worked on solving the “paradox” of poverty in the context of affluence. And yet those efforts were constrained from the outset by liberalism’s flaws. What these liberal champions produced was a body of thought that treated poverty more as a cultural handicap, or psychological affliction, than as a condition resulting from structural inequality and racism. Unable to look directly at capitalism and racism, Great Society liberals mostly crafted social policy that assumed that mere tinkering with America’s political institutions and practices could end poverty and integrate the excluded. And as they did so, they relied on racist tropes and condescending assumptions about the urban poor that insisted that the primary problems rested elsewhere anyway. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his 1965 report on the dire state of the black family, his focus on matriarchy represented not merely a rhetorical flourish but deep-seated liberal assumptions about the causes of multigenerational black poverty.

The history of liberalism from this point onward is nearly too sad to relate, as any concerned progressive today knows. By and large, the Democratic Party responded to the new conservative mood in politics, inaugurated by Ronald Reagan, by capitulating to it. Fast-forward a dozen years after Reagan’s election and we’re witnessing Bill Clinton—in the eyes of some a testament to everything great and good about contemporary liberalism—further eroding the already meager social safety net and ratcheting up a racist war on drugs. Contrary to current popular commentary, Clinton’s presidency did not represent so much a betrayal of liberalism as the expression of some of its oldest impulses.

More: http://www.democracyjournal.org/36/liberal-heal-thyself.php

[Leith]

1. Nope, Sorry

Same old conservative nonsense, this time with $20 words and complicated sentence structure. The essay is filled with erroneous assumptions (when did Clinton become "a testament to everything great and good about contemporary liberalism?&quot , conservative talking points (liberals are the real racists), and flat out lies (there's a welfare state and it's racist).

It looks like Ms. Averback wants to be the new Buckley, but so far she is just following the propaganda pack.